1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the fields of data mining, expert systems, and system theory. In particular, the preferred embodiment relates to interactive data mining regarding the health of a human organism, described as a system.
General System Theory was introduced in the early twentieth century by the German/Canadian Biologist Ludwig Von Bertalanffy. Classical science, and its diverse disciplines, be they chemistry, biology, psychology, or the social sciences, tended to isolate individual elements of the observed universe, such as chemical compounds and enzymes, cells, elementary sensations, freely competing individuals, etc. and assumed that by putting theses elements together again, either conceptually or experimentally the whole or system under consideration—i.e., the cell, mind, or society—would result and be intelligible. In engineering terminology this approach was equivalent to reducing every system to the linear response of its various components and superposing or aggregating those linear responses to monitor the system as a whole. The problem with such an approach, or opistimology, is the fact that a whole is often more than the sum of its parts. There is often nonlinear and non-intuitive interaction and interdependence between the so called “components” of any system. General system theory is the scientific exploration of wholes and wholeness. General system theory assumes that for a true understanding of any system comprehension not only of the elements is required but of their varied interaction and interrelations as well. This requires exploration of systems in their own right and specificities.
The application of general systems theory to medicine would require nonlinear medical thinking. It mostly has to do with the approach one takes towards understanding what has caused and event, such as a symptom or a collection of symptoms, signs, and lab tests which are referred to as an illness. As present most medical thinking remains linear. Doctors and patents alike are tempted by the idea that an illness has a single cause that can be treated with a single remedy; such as a pill or a surgical procedure. General systems theory, when applied to medicine, presents ideas about causality in which a web of interactions produces a result that is not easy to pin on a single causative facture. Therefore the resolution of medical problems, or health is sustained by achieving a state of balance among countless strands of the web of genetic, physiologic, psychic, developmental, environmental factors all of which contribute to the state of well being, or lack thereof of human beings. When something goes wrong with ones health, it makes sense to pay attention of all aspects of this web that can be addressed with reasonable cost and risk.
The notion of systems is not unknown to traditional medical thinking. However, its meaning is quite different from the sense it is acquired among the inheritance of general systems theory. Traditionally, medical education is organized via various bodily systems such as the cardiovascular, nervous, immune, reproductive, gastrointestinal, integumentary (skin), musculoskeletal, endocrine, reticuloendothelial and hematologic. It is theses systems that serve as the basis for classifying disease. Upon graduation from medical school novice doctors are expected to choose a particular system and become a specialist. On the other hand, systems theory as applied to medicine provides a unifying model of how things operate, and allows the viewing of biological systems as interconnected and interacting unity of their various components. As a result, one can make functional—as opposed to anatomical—divisions, as overall balances assessed within the system. The theory that has dominated medical science for the greater part of the twentieth century is that people get sick because they are the victims of disease. A better theory is that people get sick because of a disruption of the dynamic balance that exists between themselves and their environment. This latter theory works just as well to describe what happens when one gets chicken pox as it does when there is a more complex problem in which many genetic, environmental, and nutritional factors interact.
Because of the prevailing disease oriented approach of medical language the illusion is created that if one possesses the name of a disease responsible for a patients complaints, then one can solve that patients health problem. A better mental model would be one in which all of the details of a person's problem are preserved as opposed to abstracting our theoretical based notions of important as opposed to unimportant “symptoms”. Such a language would allow the totality of the information content of the state of a person's health at a given time be preserved. All that would remain needed is the means to extract it and to analyze it.
Digital computers are particularly adapted to such a task. Portraits of a human health status, including reported symptoms, observant indications and laboratory reports can be constructed in such a way so as to preserve the totality of information contained in such a health “snapshot” while still using the names commonly used in medical science to describe the main features of illness. Computers are utilized to make complex pictures out of human health data. If the data is detailed, accurate and structured, the pictures will reflect reality and allow patterns to emerge which are not necessarily visible to the naked eye. The computer can be used as a “microscope” for viewing large patterns as much as the microscope is used to view the exceedingly small.
In order to use a digital computer in such a way, a format must be created that can be easily encoded into digital data, processed, and decoded into a meaningful output. Users' verbal descriptions of their medical states must be carefully guided into precise and orthogonal categories which can each be assigned a number value, resulting in a multidimensional set of numbers representative of each user's health snapshot. Each dimension would represent some medical attribute. The presence of absence of some condition, sensation, or state, the severity, frequency, or character of the condition, and the duration, onset in correlation to other states or user activities of the problem, to name some general examples.
2. Related Art
Related art in the field of the invention is sparse. Although there are numerous medical database/medical information computer programs and websites, accessible via a local computer, the Internet or other data network, all offering the user the ability to search for a variety of information, none offers the user an opportunity to express the totality ofhis or her current health snapshot using system provided categories and divisions of the semantic plane. As a result these sites function as efficient and highly accessible medical encyclopedias. Noting more. There is no actual interaction between knowledge stored in the websites server and the health snapshot of the user to generate information that the user would not otherwise know.
In fact, across the gambit of medical web sites and related and equilivent interactive informational tools, the “mental map” or “semantic plane” and the corresponding technical language or taxonomy, by means of which both the queries are posed to, and the information, or output is generated from, the system database—is the traditional disease based singular cause and effect model discussed above. Therefore, one can at these sites and their equilivent, learn the “causes” and treatments, of a variety of “diseases”. As well, one can learn the “disease” causing ones reported symptomology usually, but one cannot discover what percentage of other persons reporting similar symptomology also have similar problems as the user which are not commonly considered to be part of the symptomology of the “disease”. For example, suppose someone reports a shortness of breath. Because the medical informational tools currently available to the public do not dynamically interact with the information reported by a user (to the extent that they extensively query the user at all) a given user cannot know that eighty three percent (83%) of persons reporting or seeking the assistance of the medical website also had a strange rash on the soles of their feet. Or, as another example, persons reporting shortness of breath could acquire a variety of information about cardiovascular health and potential problems, but could never know how many people reported a folic acid deficiency and poor night vision as well.
It is only through the articulation of the totality of events (in reality a reasonable tractable representative set thereof) indicative of a human organisms health, including the various mental, biochemical, physical and other processes that completely describes the system as a whole that ones health “system” can be objectively described.
What is therefore desired or needed to truly exploit the massive automated information extraction and handling and processing capabilities of the digital computer, and by extension, a network of digital computers, is the creation of (i). A carefully constructed taxonomy that facilitates the exhausts of mapping of a human organisms health snapshot into words (ii). System of querying the user so as to translate his or her responses into the categories of said taxonomy that would allow complete mapping of their health snapshot, (iii). A means of encoding information content of the user health snapshot into numerical values that can be manipulated by digital computer, and finally (iv) a method of processing the encoded information representing a user's health snapshot so as to allow the interaction of that user's health snapshot with a database of other user's health snapshots so as to generate meaningful inferences and analysis of the user's health snapshot so as to output meaningful information to the user.